11/3/12: Dolomites Day 5

I planned on running the Potomac Heritage 50K for the 4th time this morning, but I bagged it last minute. I ended up running the Marine Corp Marathon harder than I had expected. Recovery has been great, and I did a bunch of easy runs this week, but it would be foolish to go out there and run a 50K 6 days days after running a 2:58 marathon.

I really love this local race and am sad to miss it, but I am still looking for to the MGM 50K in December and some serious Turkey Trotting later this month. Since I did not run at all today, I also had time to post more Dolomite pictures. Hooray!

Day 5 in the Dolomites was seriously eventful. Highlights included:

Jen's birthday!
Covering two full stages
A sweet chair lift ride
Getting stuck up high on the mountain above treeline during an insane storm with lightning and torrential downpours
Beautiful high alpine lake

We started off by hiking past the Pelmo and then into some dense forest. Thanks to our guidebook being about as easy to read as old school VCR instruction manuals, we did not realize that we were supposed to take a diversion from the true Alta Via trail. This would have been a shortcut and would also have kept us up at a steady 2,000M.

Instead we plunged down over 500M in the other direction and popped out at the base of a ski area. We had a brief lunch / snack at the lodge and then started doing some serious thinking. We had been getting increasingly concerned about the length of the last day of hiking and how late we would get into Venice. We decided to make this a big day and cover two full stages to leave only about 2 hours for the final day. Given the huge amount of terrain we had to cover and the unintended detour, I was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about taking the easy way and riding the chair lift to skip over 300M of climbing.

On the way up a light rain started. Luckily we had waterproof jackets and rainflys for our packs. Look at us being so prepared! Fortunately there was still tons of climbing left after the chair lift as we went up to about 2,400M.

Rifugio Coldai was at the top of the climb. It had a fantastic view and was where we had planned to spend the night. It was close to 1pm and we planned to do another entire stage of hiking, so we blew right by the Rifugio and motored along.

Shortly after the Rifugio we hit a beautiful alpine lake. The weather was turning sour again, and we had to bust out the rain jackets and make our way into the cold, wet wind. We could not even see the lake at all since we couldn't see more than a few feet in front of our faces. But as we looped around the lake, everything miraculously cleared up! We were treated to some most excellent views and stopped for a sandwich and some pictures. Ahh, good times.

Right after we left the lake, things got real. Very real. We literally saw the front coming in and the storm just erupted. We were way above tree line, and there was lots of lightning. Not good. We hit a fork in the road, and there was a route that continued on high ground and one that descended steeply down. We couldn't see anything and did not know what way was actually right, but we knew we had to get off the mountain with all of the lightning.

We headed down the mountain, and Jen ... was ... flying. It was all I could do to keep up! She damn sure was not about to get hit by lightning on her birthday, and she was hauling ass towards safety. The lightning died down, and it just absolutely poured. We might as well have jumped into the lake. I was trying to take everything important (e.g. our maps) and stuff it in the pockets inside my waterproof jacket to protect things as much as possible.

Just as soon as it started, the downpour stopped. There were huge white cliffs to our left, and it was amazing to see these waterfall rivers run down the mountain after the rain stopped. Pretty soon it was back to beautiful blue sky, and we started working to get everything dry.

With wet clothes and gear hanging all over our packs, we pushed on along. This next section was really beautiful with towering white cliffs, lush green cow pastures, and great views in the distance. Other than a few close encounters with some large bulls, the rest of the trip was uneventful.

As we made our way towards the Rifugio, we came to a clearing with the most stunning views of the south side of Civetta D'Ampezzo. Luckily we had this same amazing view from Rifugio Vazzoler for Jen's Birthday. We made it there around 4:30 and some nice time to relax, dry out, and celebrate Jen's birthday. I had stashed a Twix bar that I picked up several days before, which made for quite the b-day present.